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Sproing

I should make an update, shouldn't I?
Especially since it's been over a month since my last post, and my self-imposed deadline has expired.

I bought seed starter kits and entirely too many packets of seeds, all of them the same thing: sage. I decided, back at the beginning of March, that since I buy so much of it to dry and burn, that I should really just grow my own.
My seeds are actually sprouting! I have a tray of them in the kitchen window, and they are happily doing their thing. The packet said they needed to germinate for a few weeks, so imagine my surprise when I noticed them popping out after only a week. I will have a LOT of sage to plant outside in May. If I don't manage to kill the seedlings somehow, between now and then. I'm not ruling it out. After all, I do have a black thumb, haha.

On to the latest writing news.
That last push through the end of March actually went well. I won't pretend that I'm exorbitantly satisfied with the current state of affairs that is the end of the manuscript, but that's redundant since, you know, hello editing that is what you are for, yes?


So, March has ended and yes, the WIP Overhaul was defeated at long last. Exhausted at 120k, only to discover that it will most definitely need split in two, and editing on the second half will be necessary in order to expand it into a more comparable length.

The April round of edits, which I dubbed "clean up this hot mess," have commenced. I'm almost to the halfway mark of what will be "volume one." Definitely making good time to have a decent version to sub out, and the general synopsis is already in place for the full arc of this first (two volume) book in the series.

I'll admit it doesn't feel like I accomplished much despite the fact that I reached the goal I set for March. Perhaps that's because the work is far from complete and it's just been one step of many along this story's path. It's been a very long path. Twenty years in the traveling, which never ceases to thoroughly boggle my mind every time I try to think about it.

Many years ago, a beta reader dubbed this world, this story, my very own "Gone With The Wind." When I laughed and shook my head and tried to deny it, they explained how Margaret Mitchell only ever published the one book, slaved over the writing of it all her life, and had pieces of the manuscript everywhere.

Thank the gods for technology and Scrivener, I say. The journey of this story has been a great deal like driving a high performance race car. Starting out in low gear, and walking up to the full throttle speed of development that comes with intimate world-building familiarity and knowing the characters so well. Even with sweeping, broad alterations, enough remains sound and stable that the shifts are executed with smooth precision.

I'm getting somewhere with this story finally.
And finally I am, as a writer, in a place where I have grown and evolved enough to move with poise and confidence and double-clutch the manual transmission and shift as smooth as a hot knife through butter.
What a hot mess of analogies that is. I should get back to the editing now.

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